Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk on facts, literary fiction and history

In the beautiful campus of Bosphorus University in Istanbul, Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk, leading names in contemporary world literature, held a lecture-dialogue.

The topic of the lecture was "On facts, literary fiction and history", which was a good reason for these two authors to present their views on literature and the role of the novel in the modern world, as well as their own artistic and intellectual involvement.

Orhan Pamuk: "The desire to become a writer arose because I did not want to be an engineer like most of my family members, nor to work in a place where I would receive or give orders, and mostly because I wanted to do something where I would be left alone, undisturbed".

Umberto Eco: "Until I was fifty, I was a professor of semiotics in Bologna, and then I went further in what I was already doing, which was writing papers on language and the history of communication, but now with the structure of a detective novel.

As a young man I wrote stories, but decided that I had no talent for novels. Many years later, when I submitted my doctoral thesis to my supervisor, he told me that the only problem with the thesis was its language, that is, its closeness to the detective genre. I thought at the time that it was not a minus at all".

Cotton: "First I started writing, and then questions began to appear to me about which I believed I had something to tell".

Eko: "I write, some climb Mont Blanc, and others rob banks. We cannot discuss the reasons for choosing a profession".

Cotton: "There are writers I have called 'naive', who are confident in their spontaneous delivery of the text, and 'naive' readers who are often convinced of its autobiographical origins.

A "sentimental" (or deconstructive, self-aware) writer is in a very different position in the text: he is beset by doubt and continually aware of the power and problems of his craft. "Sentimental" readers are cynical, focused on thinking about the structure of the text, which they see as a "bonus "enjoyment in literature".

Eko: "There are two levels of storytelling that Agatha Christie's detective novel The Murder of Hodger Ackroyd well illustrates." The narrator eventually reveals that the murderer is himself, forcing the (engaged) reader to start a new search through the text. It is the first level of the text, which contains a hiding place, and brings a surprise to the reader.

At the second level, there is an aesthetic analysis and evaluation of the text, as the author's skill. Both Pamuk and I are fascinated by the fact that people are crying over the fate of Anna Karenina, while it is known for certain that it is a character that did not exist in reality.

Aristotle's approach to catharsis (from the "Poetics") is useful for understanding the author's relationship to the feelings found in the text: experiencing suffering together with the characters leads to a process of 'homeopathic' cleansing from their negative consequences. reduced her experience".

Cotton: "It can be said that we are talking about two types of readers: those who cry when reading Anna Karenina, and others who "inspect" the text, analyze the context and form, and thus act and "sneer".

However, my argument is that the novel succeeded in suppressing all other literary forms in the 19th century precisely because it made us discover the possibilities of our mind to experience contradictory feelings: to be crying naive readers (and writers) on the one hand, and on the other (or even simultaneously) we deconstruct the text and admire or criticize the skill of the writers".

Eko: "I agree that most people are stupid (laughter on stage and in the hall), and the percentage of those who think so increases with age. Because, when at the end of my life I know that all people are stupid, it will be easy for me to die By the way, I don't know what it really means that Pamuk and I are writing postmodern novels.

Joyce's "Ulysses" certainly stands at the beginning of the modern novel, in which eighteen points of view correspond to eighteen chapters, and the writer narcissistically exaggerates the fact that he will have something to tell in the novel.

Multiple points of view can also occur at the level of language and style. In my novel "The Island of the Day Before", the action of which takes place in the 17th century, the characters would have to speak in a baroque language. However, this was unbearable for me, and the baroque nature of the novel is maintained by the structure of the narration and its ideas, and not by imitating direct speech. .

Cotton: "It is with such procedures that the problems of realistic novels of the 19th century, such as Zola's, begin to be overcome, and they begin to be written for the tastes of sophisticated social classes".

Eko: "My novels "The Name of the Rose", "Baudolino" and "Prague Cemetery" are historical and they "fit" me, perhaps because I don't want to be emotionally involved in what I write about. I could never write about Fusun (love the main character from Pamuk's "Museum of Innocence") in the way that Pamuk does it.

Cotton: "Writers also write novels to tell personal stories, camouflaging their feelings. However, the text must contain the writer's "signature", like, for example, Hemingway's description of a sunny morning".

Eko: "Well, I can't deny that my feelings are not contained in the novels! I was asked what is the most autobiographical aspect of your novels? I answered: Verbal adverbs!"

Cotton: "I thank the organizers, and especially Eko, for the opportunity to learn a lot".

Eko: "I cannot repeat what Pamuk has already said, so as not to fall into plagiarism".